Helen McClory
I was looking for a place to sit down when I saw a woman dressed in black tearing a page out of the book she was reading and putting it into her mouth. The café was dark, with rain trickling down the windows and the gothic city behind it painted broadly, though the woman was lit up in the golden beam from a downturned pendulum light, also black, giving an appearance as if the whole thing was a deliberate set up for such a performance. I approached slowly with my tray: The book was a poetry book, The Wild Iris by someone called Louise Glück. I watched her lips open, the page move, her teeth dragging at the paper. This went on for a few leisurely minutes, during which time she stared off somewhere out of the frame of her life. At last I sat at her table and asked what poem it was that she had eaten.
"That's not the right question," she said. "See?" She hadn't successfully eaten it, showing me the remnants in her hand and mouth. Her saliva couldn't wet it enough to get it down. I handed her my glass of water, and after a sip she was able to swallow it away.
Her name was Varine. I should say now that Varine was very beautiful; otherwise you won't believe that I approached her at all. She had long, fine red hair that would have made Edvard Munch pull out his sketchbook and ink. It snaked a little greasily over her shoulders, menacing her teacup and its rusty-coloured contents. Her skin looked like a renaissance painter had put the colour down over a layer of green to give it a ceramic illumination. She had the high, alarming air of someone who hadn't slept in days.
"What should I ask, then?"
"The matter of the word. Not so much a question, but. I have some thoughts we could discuss. If you are the sort of woman who could sustain her part in a philosophical conversation. Are you?"
Varine blinked at me, then her eyes rolled back and she fell into some kind of fit. I helped her into a comfortable position on the floor, and watched her kicking her black-stockinged legs, making and unmaking fists with her hands. I had never been in the position to watch someone having a fit before. A doctor who happened to be sitting in the café approached her after the shaking stopped and grabbed her wrist.
"There's no pulse," he murmured, and I examined his face. It showed that he believed this to be true. When Varine came round, she sat back up in her seat and took a sip of rooibos.
"Low blood pressure," the doctor said. "Make sure you eat a little better."
I believed I had just witnessed someone make a brief, informal detour into Hell. I sat back down on my chair across from her.
"You look like you've never seen a woman die before," Varine said. I said nothing, but folded her black sleeve up to the blue-veined fold of her inner arm, and put my hand around her wrist. I pressed here and there with my fingers. I couldn't find the heartbeat.
"What poem was it?" I asked.
"That's not entirely useful information, is it?" she said thickly.
What we talked about after that, I don't recall.
This was the beginning of our intimacy. We met by chance. Chance is very favourable to meetings in a small city. By late November, we were seeing each other daily, sometimes in the café and sometimes in the gallery at the bottom of the hill. I liked the combination of red wallpaper and gilded framing, while the contents of the pictures left me unmoved. Most things did. My friends, who came and went from my life like bubbles on a river, had often told me that I lacked passion for things. I took their comments mildly and filed them away. I had thought that perhaps my passions lived somewhere else, and that one day I would catch up to them. Now this was proving to be true, though I was unaware yet if my passion would have passion for me. We had said very little of note as yet, and had yet to wade into the philosophical, as she had indicated was her wish.
Varine had a favourite hideaway in the city, a walled garden recreated along Italianate lines. Walking there, she brushed the heads of the lavender with her hip, and confessed to owning a crooked little house in the countryside where she would occasionally take men. They were better people, in the country, because it made them quiet, she said. They were afraid of the silence around her house at night, and so tried to lose themselves in pleasing her. I didn't care to be told such things.
"I want to talk about everything with you," I said, meaning, I want to keep talking to you, but not about men. "Where is it you stay when you're in the city?" But she would never tell me. I lived in a basement flat reachable by the canal path, a badly-lit lane I enjoyed passing down at nights when there was no moon, my form lost to the darkness. One such night I was walking back from a concert. Varine had been there, but she had decided not to acknowledge me. She had her hair up, and wore a black dress that made me tremble. There was a man on the seat next to her, flicking through a programme for almost the whole length of the performance. Either he was bored or an obsessive. I thought not the latter. He could have had some other feeling, but the feelings of others are not always clearly discernible to me. This is only rarely a problem. I prefer not to understand such things, it seems a cruel magic, to be able to peer into the locked rooms of other people. As I walked home, narrowly avoiding being hit by cyclists carrying their bands of light away from me at speed, down the black road by the black water, I decided that with Varine I wanted to make an exception. I began to plan how to get as close to her as I could without causing her to become uncomfortable and sending me away. It was a risk. Even though it was winter, the night was very beautiful, terrible in its depth. And so was Varine, in her richness, complexity, of self.
A tower of small cakes and sandwiches fell over at the table next to ours, making a lot of noise. The old ladies both wailed, "Oh no, oh no!" as if they had heard some terrible news from a war. A waiter rushed to their side and was assailed by apologies and pleas as he righted the tower and scooped up the broken pastries. Varine watched them with an inscrutable expression, upright in her chair. Her posture was frequently perfect, her hands held themselves or the objects she required with a light sternness that made me think of a painter holding the neck of an animal he wished to keep alive until he could place it just off centre in his still life. I watched her, and the room moved around us. I had now known Varine about three years, and was no closer to her than I had been the night I had seen her in the theatre in her finery sitting on velvet with her unequal man. I wanted to wring the truth of her, like screwing up a cut lemon and watching the juice and pulp splash out.
"Escadine," she said in her harsh, glamorous voice, "Do you want to visit my house?" It seemed to me then to be the first time I had heard my name sounded out in her mouth, though I am sure she must have by necessity used it before that time. The waiter walked past with a scone in his hand moulded into the shape of a crumbling frog.
"The one in the country?"
"Yes. I think we'd have better conversations there."
The top bookshelf held mostly poetry in peeling volumes. I wasn't sure Varine owned many books that were under seventy, until I checked the shelf below and found a selection of newish covers, all empty. Inside the pages had all been torn out. It must take a long time to eat that many, I thought, and I wondered how long she had had the habit, and if it could possibly be good for her. It could, possibly. Across from the shelves, not so far across since the room was small, was a fireplace with a mantle, draped in black. On the black fabric were several page-coloured bones and skulls organised by a principle I could not detect. I considered that I must be nervous. Varine was at the stove, boiling a yellowish soup from butcher's bones. I did not care to think what else was in the soup. But if Varine had made it, I would slurp it down burning hot. She brought me a tea first, made of some locally grown flowers. I supposed she had brought all of her men to this room, and had them sit on the sofa before instructing them by subtle indications to move to the bedroom. There was a record player beside the fire. Varine chose an album of Debussy.
"It makes the tea taste like spring," she said, "though it's so cold."
I couldn't think of anything to say. It seemed that I might say the wrong thing so easily, and ruin the evening and all my future happiness. Apart from this, I was happy. I hadn't been given a tour of the house when I arrived. I was picturing the approach to the house. Stepping off the bus, I had been instructed to walk downhill on a bike path for ten minutes, then take a left onto the drive. It was very dark by the point I reached the turnoff, and I had a moment of wooziness after walking a few steps, the cause of which I was to find out later. I used my hands to find my way, glad of the internal mechanism that kept me upright even as my legs pushed me uncertainly forward. The drive had a thick layer of gravel on it, and on either side a low sandstone wall.
"You didn't meet anyone on the road?" Varine asked, as if she had read my mind.
"No," I said, though it wasn't quite true. Midway along the drive, I had felt the wooziness threaten to pitch me over. I sat on the wall a moment to get my bearings. The darkness of the night was not enough to make me feel this shaky. Was it my mood, then? I had wanted to go to Varine's house for so long that, now the time had come, I was quite fired up, in my way. For the first time in my life I felt like something was about to arrive and overcome me. But that was speaking metaphorically. I glanced over the wall and tried to make out the surrounding countryside. A cloud drifted away from the moon, revealing the grainy silhouettes of trees below me. The land on either side fell away precipitously; overlooking the edge I could see down to a ravine, the bottom of which was obscured, though I heard the rushing sound of water, and felt the damp emanating upwards then with the smell of moss and the leachings of rocks. The walls of the drive, the bridge in fact, which at my level were only three feet high, extended far beneath into the darkness. This was the source of my vertigo, the knowledge my body had of the drop on either side of me.
As I was sitting on the bridge contemplating how to go on, I sensed a figure coming towards me from the way I had just walked. It was not a person but a spirit. I knew this instinctively just as I had felt the sense of void around me. I sat with my hands in my lap, and the spirit came towards me slowly. I supposed creatures of that kind could walk as fast or as slow as they liked, since they had nothing but time at their disposal. In this country, there is an old understanding, now fading, that the land is home to spirits that might be the spirit of a person or something otherworldly. You might even meet the devil, though not the Christian devil, out walking with his silver-handled stick or his pipes, especially on an old bridge this far out beyond the city bounds. The spirit went on with drifting footsteps until it eventually reached me. It paused a moment, seeming to look down at me, though as there were no eyes, I couldn't tell if it did, or whether it could see at all.
"Good evening," I said. Some cultures will tell you not to acknowledge the supernatural for fear that it will see itself as your equal, a human, and that it will feel entitled then to challenge your humanity and take it from you. But I had been brought up to be polite. It snuffed at the air, like a dog will snuff at the underside of a door it wishes to go through, then it walked to the end of the bridge, and disappeared. I could see the light from Varine's red sandstone house lapping at the darkness where the spirit had vanished. It made sense that I walk there, rather than give up, having come this far.
Varine was not particularly moved by my negative answer. She shrugged and sipped her tea. I expected her to tell me a story about a ghostly soldier, or a soul-stealing witch, but she only wrapped her hands tighter around her mug and stared off. She might, I thought, find supernatural stories very dull, and this one, in particular, had no point to it. I had received no warning, and I hadn't been threatened in any way either. The spirit had neither howled nor peeled off its skin to reveal the screaming horror below. This feeling of an uninteresting or incomplete message was perhaps why I had chosen to say nothing of what I had seen.
Varine's house was quite hard to understand. There was the living room with tarry kitchenette, her bedroom, a toilet somewhere, all on the same floor, though overhead and beneath my feet I had the suspicion of an attic, a cellar. In the ceiling over the stove was a trapdoor with a rope handle, and as soon as I noticed it I was unable not to think of the cavity above and what might be dwelling up there, as pet or prey. Varine ladled the soup; it was oily and plumed up a rich-smelling steam that clung in shining droplets from her hair. The bones, thick as Varine's wrists, had cracked open and showed their dark brown marrow as they turned and bobbed in the liquor. While we ate at her small table, I observed the room and the woman who had arranged it, listening to her talk about the importance of letting conversation negate you. Between certain compatible people, she said, all speech, even written, is an attempt to reach a final silence. The idea of being able to say no more was the purpose of speaking, between two such people. I thought then that I felt differently for myself. I only wanted to convince her I was acceptable company so that she would never let me go. In order to do this, I felt I had to persuade her by subtle means to show me the rest of her house.
We finished the meal. It had a complex flavour but was insubstantial. I felt something in my soul had been revived, but my body felt the lightness of hunger under a film of sustenance.
"Well, what now?" the record had come to an end, but I saw my moment.
"I'd love to see the rest of the house."
"Oh," she said, "I sometimes forget . . ."
But what she forgot, she forgot to reveal to me. As I had suspected, there was an attic above. She clicked on the light and gave illumination to waltzing motes and worn Persian rugs splayed over the floorboards. On the far wall there was a window with a desk under it.
"I once knew a man who sailed to different ports, a real traveller and raconteur. He died of complications from a beetle's bite. He left this desk to me in his will. I think he never wrote at it even once."
I was trying to formulate a response to this when she said, "I like that you're so quiet. It seems as though you carry it around you like an atmosphere. I believe you might be receptive to something. But it depends on your mood at the present moment. Would you say that you're ready for an act of revelation?"
By instinct I looked down to check if the trapdoor was under me. As it was not, I replied, "Yes, I am," feeling that Varine required from me the utmost assurance. I didn't truly believe she was luring me into some sort of trap. I am not normally given to fancies like this, but she somewhat invited them, Varine. She grabbed my hand and led me towards the cellar. There are only rarely people you encounter in life who will possess you in this way, the way that the sky can possess in autumn a flight of golden leaves and carry them along without resistance, imparting a sense of awe. I am unsure if autumn leaves cannot feel awe, borne along like this. Some part of you understands that the wind, the other person, is greater than you. They might destroy you, if they like, and you would trust them to do it so completely as to be worth any amount of suffering in the process.
There was a narrow iron stair spiralling down to the cellar through a narrow column like a chimney. The same sandstone that made up the bridge and the house was here running with wet, the surface coming away in red bits when I brushed against it. The cellar was at least double the height of the building below the earth, but when we got there, I was surprised to see moonlight from a barred window, shining in the space.
"This house is built into foundations that are much older," said Varine, "If you approach it from the river you can see the wall that made up an old castle. There's part of a ruined keep, too, though only a little remains. This material, it doesn't last," she pronounced this last sentence in a sad tone, with a sense of finality behind it. She approached a wooden kist in the centre of the floor. It did not precisely look like a coffin, though one could infer a similar use for it from its funereal engravings—wreaths of holly and branches of what looked like hawthorn in bloom. The initials VS were carved in large and interlocking lettering on the lid. Varine had a crowbar in her hand.
"A minute. Are you ready, then?" I took a few seconds to compose a response. Her eyes in the moonlight shone, and she looked almost angry, so full of emotion that it read as anger. Once I had met the eyes of a leopard who had escaped her cage and was attempting to slink towards the overgrown wood at the edge of the zoo. I stood between her and concealment and freedom. She looked at me, and her whole body tensed as if she would jump on me and tear out my heart with her teeth. Her animal eyes all yellow and black, the pupil flinching as she took my measure. She held her muscles taut, but I could see them moving subtly beneath the skin and spotted fur. I felt as though the leopard and I stood together in a band of darkness, the darkness that rushes in after the cycles have left me on the path when I am walking, but both a newer and older night than that. It was one of the most erotically charged moments of my life. And then the moment passed, and she ran off. A group of keepers later managed to divert her back to her cage with a scrap of meat on a litter-picker.
"Yes," I breathed.
With a crack, Varine had levered the heavy wooden lid from the kist, and it fell to the floor with a thud that I felt in my spine. Nothing in reality could live up to the fantasy I had in those few minutes built within my mind. In the kist was a great deal of gold brocade, binding up various goods—watches, ties, books, wallets—some of which were very moth-eaten. It was a repository for mementos Varine had stolen from her men over the years. The only thing that was a little surprising was the volume of objects. But Varine was, as I said, very beautiful, and could easily get any man she wanted. There would not be many who could match her for beauty themselves, and every encounter must have been, I thought, a little of a let-down, an admittance of the mundanity of others, disgraceful to her splendour.
She let me keep a set of cufflinks in roughcut jet. Or rather, she saw me looking at them, and put them in my hand.
"Wear them for me," she said, "Merry Christmas."
I had a buttonhole in the lapel of my jacket, and placed one there, and the other through the cuff of my shirt where it was meant to go. I couldn't see them properly until the next day, but I could feel their weight against me.
The next morning we went for a walk into the ravine, which was bright with frost. Varine had seen mink capering by the riverbank on her early walks and expressed the desire I see them too, though I did not feel any urgency in seeing some animal for coats, not then. I was groggy and had a ravenous hunger, but it seemed my host required very little to fuel her energies. She gave me a hat and gloves to wear, expressing a warm surprise that I hadn't thought to bring them. In truth, I hadn't dared to hope I'd spend the night. Nothing had happened between us, but that nothing was immense and I felt it in me like a wide, dark lake. I had slept on the half-sunken sofa in her bedroom, or rather, I dozed, too excited to have been granted the sight of Varine at rest in her bed (three mattresses stacked on a tall wooden base, summited by ladder), Varine vulnerable, drifting into sleep. I wanted to feast on the sight of her form under the covers, her fine red hair slipping over the pillow, to make some sort of approach to her, but stronger still was the instinct to hold myself firm, so that nothing would be damaged.
The morning sun was low, playing in the beeches at the top of the ravine. Black branches reached up towards the sky like a kind of language, while our breaths in the guise of white clouds asserted our existence as hot imperfect little mammals. Varine talked away, all about the history of the house, the castle it was, and the grounds around about. There was a chapel over the rise she said had been there since before there was a faith for chapels.
"What had it been then?" I asked.
"A place of lesser sins," Varine said. I was silent. I had nothing to say that could augment or correct my heart's instability at that moment. An excess of emotion was making it difficult for me to keep up with the pace Varine was setting. I watched her walking. I've heard it told that lovers are drawn to one another by the kind of power that births religions, that the body when seen with want becomes a place of worship and transformation. I wanted it to be so. I watched her walk, letting her go ahead of me where the path narrowed and disappeared altogether. She weaved between the silver birches with a careful indolence. I let myself wonder if she had control over her passions, and if so, what passions she had, that morning, moving through the wood. She must have known I was watching her, because sometimes she turned and caught my eye and flashed a wicked smile.
We reached a point where the river split in two, with a high rocky island forcing the channels to flow treacherously fast. The remaining leaves on the trees dripped and I could hear no birds over the sound of rushing water. Varine stumbled a little, and put a palm to her head.
"Sorry," she said, "I just feel a little dizzy."
"This place seems to cause dizziness," I said. Then her legs gave out and she went falling backwards into the red bracken. It was only chance that she did not tumble forwards into the river. I stood over her, as I had that first day we met, watching her limbs shake the wet and dying vegetation. After a pause, in which I thought nothing, I reached out one leg and kicked her stuttering body towards the river. It took a few stamps but soon she rolled into the dashing white water with a deep splash, and was gone. I stood and listened. That's Varine drowned, I thought. I looked over at the island in the river, expecting and hoping to see something, the mink perhaps, tumbling about. But there was only the rocky surface at the top of it, and some patches of thin grass, flattened by the wetness of river spray. I felt quite alone, though that was to be expected.
I caught the bus after a short wait and settled in for the forty-minute ride home. On the way I looked at the things I had taken with me from Varine's house: her hardback copy of The Wild Iris, whose stumps of pages I ran my fingers over, enjoying their uneven give, which joined the pair of cufflinks she had asked me to wear. I admired the deep black glint in the many faces of the jet and closed my eyes, rubbing the stone against my throat. It was pleasing that its roughness matched, in some way, the torn remnants of the book. Jet, too, is made of wood, and time.
At home I washed and sat down on my bed. I wondered where Varine was now. Her body would have been carried away by the current after the walls of the channel had had done with her. Bloodied and collapsed in on itself, it was either stuck against some rocks further downstream or else had made it to the sea. I contemplated my inner feelings on what I had done, trying to excavate something significant, but all I found in me was dust. So instead I tried to find a reason behind the apparition on the bridge the night before. It was probably an echo from my own mind, I thought. What kind of echo? A warning shout, or simply a call for me to acknowledge the sense I had that I was—what?
Day turned to evening without haste. I was lying down in my nightgown and slippers, topped off by a naked quilt. I was attempting to dry the sheets over the radiator, but it was proving difficult. It was often damp in my flat, and always darker than the outside. I began coughing, a crinkling cough from an irritation deep in my lungs. A figurine sat on the tallboy opposite my bed, guarding the jet cufflinks and the empty book; she was a woman in a large white frock, with a pink touch to the glazed flounces. Still coughing I reached over and picked her up and moved her around. There was a vegetal quality to the folds of her dress, like they had been modelled on the veined leaves of cabbages. She had a pretty face and red hair, and so I had associated her for many years with Varine. Indeed, that was why I had bought her in the first place, from a charity shop in a rich part of town. Still, even possessing Varine in ceramic form had not been enough. The charm of wanting her had not been enough, and neither had I been able to work out how to confess how I felt. To make it all the more disappointing I wasn't sure, even then, the texture of my feelings, or, ultimately, their importance. I coughed again and spat out something from the very bottom of my chest—a scrap of gold brocade. I hadn't remembered putting anything of that substance in my mouth. I disposed of it down the side of the bed.
It was very late and I hadn't eaten at all for many hours. I made myself a cup of warm milk and sat in the chintzy armchair by my front door. I put the figurine beside me, between my hip and the armrest. A wintery wind had picked up and was rattling the cover on the blocked-up chimney and soughing through minute gaps between the window frame and the sill. I felt the warm milk flowing down my throat and into my stomach. It was very quiet, not even the tick of a clock for company. A mood settled in. It was a knocking at the door, faint at first, that woke me from drowsiness. The knocking continued. I registered it, enjoying the certainty of the sound. It went on for a long time. I felt sure that if I rose and looked through the peephole, I would see no one out there. Or else, if I were to see someone, I should not let them in. They can't get in without permission, I thought, and this thought contented me. At last, I knew, my passions had come all the way from the place where they had lived so long to find me at last, in this odd aural form, and I was making a conscious choice not to let them in, to keep them out. Still the knocking continued, consistent and regular, a sound that had in some ways always been ongoing, and indeed withheld something worse than silence by its continuity. I looked at the face of the pretty lady, and I ran the edge of my nail over its cheeks. They had a modest shine to them. On reflection, I thought, this was perhaps the best day I had ever lived through, and, though it was quite late, it wasn't over yet.